The winter of 1855-6 that I spent in Illinois was uneventful.

My success was not such as to discourage an evangelist that desires to be useful, neither was it such as to fill him with vanity.

The weather was intensely cold, and the snow was deep.
It is said that before the coming of an earthquake, the sea gives forth deep moanings, as if it felt the approaching convulsion; so at that time there seemed premonitions in the hearts of the people that the whole nation, North, South, East and West, would be swept by a political cyclone that should leave behind it the desolation that is sometimes, in the West India Islands, left in the track of a tropical hurricane.

We had heard of the murder of Dow, the rescue of Branson, and the invasion of Lawrence, and these certainly did not give promise that Kansas would be a favorable field for evangelical work, at least for a time.

The writer had not hitherto spent much of his time in Adams county; he now spent a considerable part of the winter there, and visited the churches of Quincy, Chambersburg, Camp Point, and many others.